D-Rev Designs Solution-Driven Products for Low-Income Customers

It seems simple enough: D-Rev creates products that respond to problems and improve the livelihoods. As a non-profit technology incubator, D-Rev targets people who live on less than $4 per day, and through social innovation hopes to improve their income and health indicators. According to D-Rev's website, a large amount of the solutions currently available to the 4 billion people who lack access to basic services and goods are expensive, ineffective and inappropriate. By using for-profit market mechanisms and working with local partners on-the-ground, D-Rev's goal is to have financially self-sustaining product development operations by the year 2017.

"D-Rev’s approach is to identify opportunities to improve the lives of a million-plus people a day, design products to meet the need, deliver the products, and quantify the possible global impact these products could have throughout the world," GOOD wrote about the social enterprise. D-Rev is involved in all facets of the design process, which allows it to preempt problems as well as gauge the positive impact accordingly.

"D-Rev is revolutionary in that we do more than design the product; we undertake extensive due diligence -- analyzing customer need, market demand, local infrastructure, supply chains for optimal delivery and scaling in parallel with early rapid prototyping and testing," D-Rev explains. The Design Revolution is here and it's out to solve real problems -- and like D-Rev's tagline illuminates, it's Design for the Other 90%.